Lying About Hitler
Subtitle: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: March 6, 2001
Language: eng
Number of pages: 318
ISBN-13: 9780465021529
First sentence: What is historical objectivity?
Description: "Last Year, in the most famous Holocaust court case since the Adolf Eichmann trial, controversial author David Irving brought a libel suit against Penguin Books UK and author Deborah Lipstadt, who had denounced Irving in print as one of the most dangerous Holocaust deniers at work today. As the chief historical adviser to Penguin Books in its successful defense of Lipstadt, Richard J. Evans spent two years of research in preparation for this case.

In Lying About Hitler, Evans uses the trial as a lens for exploring a range of vital questions such as who was responsible for violence and genocide against the Jews in Nazi Germany, what Hitler knew and when, and how far his henchmen Himmler and Goebbels and Nazi officials in the SS acted on their own initiative in organizing the violence and mass murder perpetrated by the Nazi regime against the Jews.".

"In ruling against David Irving in April 2000, the High Court in London labeled him a falsifier of history. No objective historian, declared the Judge, would manipulate the documentary record in the way that Irving did. Yet, one could ask, is a court of law the appropriate place to debate history? Can it really settle issues of objectivity and bias in the study of the past? Don't all historians in the end bring a subjective agenda to bear on their reading of the evidence?

The judgment branded Irving a racist, an anti-Semite and an active supporter of neo-fascism. Is it possible, though, that he lost his case not because of his biased history but because his agenda was unaceptable? Evans answers these questions and more in ways that may surprise many of the commentators and pundits on the trial.

While most people would share the court's views of Irving's work, some commentators have feared that the verdict will make it all but impossible to question the accepted version of the Holocaust."--BOOK JACKET.